Historian Nanette Napoleon’s Graveyard Walking Tours

When she walks among the graves of Oahu Cemetery in Nuuanu, historian Nanette Napoleon sees more than headstones engraved with names and dates that stretch back 172 years.

Napoleon sees a Hawaii that’s largely forgotten by the living. She sees the people who built the city when newcomers arrived by ship, captains of industry, the politicians who followed and celebrities.

Four governors are buried there. One of the first missionaries to the islands and his grandson, too. So is the man who invented modern baseball.

“I get a very deep sense of history, and it broadens my historical view of the world,” Napoleon said. “When I am doing research on someone and their life and I visit their grave, I feel an intense connection to them, like I know these people.”

The universal story of cemeteries is at the heart of Napoleon’s experience. Whenever Napoleon visits one, she experiences an appreciation for lives that were led.

“And I feel the need to tell other people; they shouldn’t be forgotten,” she said.

There are more than 400 cemeteries statewide, and Napoleon, director of the Hawaii Cemetery Research Project, has surveyed many of them during the last three decades.

Each cemetery is unique, she said. Some cater to ethnic groups and others to religions. There are public cemeteries that attract people from all walks of life. And the famous, from historic to notorious, are buried in each of them as well.

Most of the dead are gone from recent memory, familiar only in name because a street or a school also bears their name, said Napoleon, who regularly leads tours through cemeteries.

“People recognize the names, but they don’t necessarily know who they were,” she said. “My mission over the years, through my lectures and walking tours, is to bring the history back to life.”

But the famous do attract visitors.

At Oahu Cemetery many people make pilgrimages to the grave of Alexander Cartwright Jr., dubbed the father of modern baseball. Although born in New York, where he established the game, he lived most of his life in Honolulu, where he died in 1892.

As a tribute, baseballs are left at Cartwright’s grave; typically 15 to 20 can be found there on any given day. Cemetery officials leave them in front of the marker until they disintegrate, but the stock of baseballs is always being replenished.

Scott Power, president of Oahu Cemetery, knows that history is a powerful calling card. For the past four years, the cemetery has worked with Hawaiian Mission Houses Historic Site and Archives to host a play in which actors portray historical figures buried in the 18-acre graveyard.

About 80 people show up for the performances, Power said.

“These are people who are interested in the history of Hawaii and how we got to be where we are today and the impact that certain individuals had on the evolution of that,” he said. “It’s nice to gain a sense of who these individuals were and what motivated them.”

At the nearby National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Punchbowl, the graves of fallen World War II correspondent Ernie Pyle and NASA astronaut Ellison Onizuka of Kona, killed in the Jan. 28, 1986, explosion of the Space Shuttle Challenger, are probably the most visited graves in the state. Punchbowl director Jim Horton said a parade of tour buses — 50 to 60 a day — glides by, prevented from stopping under cemetery rules.

But visitors to Punchbowl seek out the graves of famous veterans such as U.S. Sen. Daniel K. Inouye, a World War II Medal of Honor recipient, who died Dec. 17, 2012.

“Most people become very quiet and reflective when they come to the cemetery,” Horton said. “And when they can relate to a person or a burial site and understand what that person did and then look around and see the thousands more buried here, it brings people to the cost of sacrifice and the cost of freedom.”

Some of the state’s most famous residents — among them Duke Kahanamoku, Don Ho and Israel Kamakawiwo‘ole — were not buried in a cemetery, but were instead cremated and their ashes scattered at sea.

But several of Hawaii’s kings and queens are buried on Oahu, mostly at Mauna Ala, the Royal Mausoleum in Nuuanu. Despite its being a resting place for royals, visitors are welcome, Napoleon said. Queen Liliuokalani and her brother, King David Kalakaua, are buried in an underground crypt marked by a tall obelisk and reached by stairs. There’s a gate at the bottom but you can see the marked graves through the iron bars. Above ground, King Kamehameha II, III, IV and V are buried in a memorial that holds all of their graves.

Across town, at Kawaiaha‘o Church Cemetery, visitors can see the resting place of King Lunalilo.

Cemeteries first fascinated the 65-year-old Napoleon in 1971, when she and two friends found shelter from an afternoon storm in a remote graveyard in Kaupo, Maui. They camped there that night, and as a full moon rose over Haleakala, the headstones were bathed in a beautiful glow.

Napoleon started studying cemeteries seriously in 1985.

Early on, she had an epiphany: Cemeteries are outdoor museums.

“I came to the realization that cemeteries are not just utilitarian repositories for the dead,” she said. “They are historic and cultural sites.”

The discoveries she made by roaming among graves keep coming. Even in Oahu Cemetery, a place Napoleon has studied for 30 years, history keeps revealing itself.

“My interest has never waned,” she said. “There is always something new to be learned in graveyards.”